Recent growth in wireless telecommunications has ushered in a new era of mobility. The advent of cellular and personal communications services has enabled people to maintain communication from virtually any location. Further, advanced technology has facilitated not only wireless voice communication but also wireless data communication, such as the ability to communicate over computer networks and to access content available over the Internet.
One of the results of this growth has been an increased demand for location-based services. Examples of such services include mapping, navigation (directions) and weather reporting. For instance, given the location of a user, a location-based-service provider can invoke a mapping routine in order to provide the user with a map of the user's geographical area. As another example, given a user's current location and a destination location, a location-based-service provider can invoke a navigation routine in order to provide the user with directions to travel from the current location to the destination location. Further, the location-based-service provider can invoke a weather reporting routine so as to provide the user with a weather report for the destination location.
In some cases, when a user contacts a location-based-service provider from a communication terminal, it is possible for the service provider to determine the user's location by determining the location of the communication terminal. Indeed, an important feature of contemporary cellular wireless networks is an ability to locate the geographical position of a mobile station. In many cases, having the ability to locate the position of a mobile station will lead to providing location-based services to mobile subscribers. For example, location-based services may allow a mobile station's user to inquire about services in their vicinity. Thus, if the user is away from his home area, the user may activate a browser on his mobile station and request consumer information in his vicinity. This information may consist of, but is not limited to, store locations, store hours, and store services. In short, by knowing where a mobile station is located, a service provider may provide a wide range of valuable location based services.
While wireless carriers and content providers have recognized the commercial significance of this new found location information, there are currently inadequate techniques for providing location information to website providers. For example, commercial web pages today require the manual entry of location information. When requesting location-specific content from these web pages, the user may know their location and manually enter it. Even though some existing service providers and products can use/interact with a Global Positioning System (GPS) device, these products are not capable of integrating location information into an online customer experience as the user interacts with a website.